


Approval Ratings

by Queenspuppet



Category: Fantastic Four, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Relationship, johnny has to work for it, silly fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-18 00:14:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12377016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queenspuppet/pseuds/Queenspuppet
Summary: Starting from the Bottom, Johnny has a long way to go to win Darcy's affections.





	Approval Ratings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bloomsoftly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloomsoftly/gifts).



> Started from the FYDL drabble-a-thon this ended up a series of drabbles for bloomsoftly, my enabler <3
> 
> unbeta'd cause I'm lazy.

5% and Below

“Lewis.”

“Storm.”

“Lewis, when are you gonna make an honest man of me and take me out on that date I’ve been asking for?”

Johnny leaned up against the partition wall next to Darcy’s desk and flexed his arms in his tank top. He’d peeled half his flame-proof suit down to his waist because he’d caught her looking at his hip line once before and he was absolutely vain enough to see if he could recreate the phenomenon.

“When I take you seriously,” Darcy said, squinting at a line of code on her computer screen.

“Ouch.” He blinked, and waited for her to acknowledge him. She didn’t, just cocked her head to one side and hit the backspace key repeatedly. “You don’t take me seriously?”

Darcy looked over at him and the pause of silence that followed made him twitch in place. “I mean. Sure. You’re…you and I take you…semi seriously,” she said with a shrug. “But I don’t take your offer of a date seriously.”

“Like, at all seriously?” he asked.

Darcy rolled her eyes and sighed. “Five percent seriously. I take it five percent seriously.”

Jesus. That wasn’t a great number. “What percentage of seriousness do I need to get you to agree?” Johnny asked.

“One hundred,” she said

“One hundred?? You have to take me one hundred percent seriously to agree to a date? What’s wrong with seventy-five?”

“I’m not going on a date while twenty five percent of me wonders if the guy is joking, Storm,” she said.

“You think I’m joking?” Shit, he was starting to squeak. He was squeaking and he was apparently  _ awful _ with women. This was a new low.

“Ninety-five percent of me does,” she said with a shrug.

Johnny squinted at her as she went back to typing. What was this? Was this him? Or was this her? Was his dating life so ridiculous that it appeared farcical? Or was Darcy Lewis just not the kind of woman who took a superhero seriously on his offer of dinner?

“What percent seriously would you take Captain Spangles if he walked in here right now and asked you out?” Johnny asked.

“Five thousand percent.”

“What the fuck?!” He was gonna set that guy’s cowl on fire.

“Steve would  _ never _ ask a girl out if he wasn’t completely serious about her, and probably not even then,” Darcy reasoned.

Ugh. That was so true too. Stupid, earnest, Captain of Truth and Celibacy.

“Okay. Okay. So. You take me one hundred percent seriously, and then we go on a date. That’s how it works?” Johnny asked, pushing off the wall. He folded his arms over his chest and, aha! Darcy looked him over head to toe, a smirk growing as she took a second glance where his suit was tied around his waist.

“Three percent,” she said.

“What? What did I do?” He threw his arms up and knocked a bit of metal, that might have been an antenna, off to one side and had to scramble after it.

“You’re treating this as a challenge,” Darcy said. “It’s a game to you.”

“I’m at five percent, Darce. That  _ is _ a challenge. But it’s a  _ sincere _ challenge,” he said. “Not a game.”

“I do think you’ll find it sincerely challenging,” she answered. She pulled up a series graph documents on her screen and went back to work.

“See?” He grinned. “I think you’re sexy when you banter with me.” He also thought it was sexy when she did complicated math in her head, like she was doing now on those graphs.

“One percent.”

Johnny left the labs before he could fall any lower.

  
  
  


9% and Rising

Darcy Lewis had him sitting at nine percent for the past week. He had brought her flowers that she had passed out to everyone, chocolates that she’d fed to jane, three damned unicorn frappes which she had promptly laughed at and given to her interns, and two tickets to see a Fleetwood Mac reunion tour show. She invited Jane to the concert, who said no. Then she invited Thor who couldn’t make it. Then she hawked the tickets over the internet to a couple of strangers at a steep discount. All while he sat in the same room with her. (“Well you were comped them, right?” she’d asked when he’d made a squawk of protest.)

This  _ had  _ to be some kind of test. Because he knew Darcy Lewis. Maybe not as well as he would have liked. Definitely not as well. But contrary to what she seemed to think, he’d been paying attention. And Darcy was not a rude, thoughtless person. She was also not a person who threw away concert tickets all wily-nily. That had really been showing her hand.

But fine. She wanted to know how serious he was. He would show her how serious he was.

He just hadn’t figured out how yet.

But he was hoping the assorted box of artisanal cupcakes in his arms was going to do the trick. He’d once seen Darcy lift an entire catering platter of cupcakes out of an office party and take them home with her. There was no way she would resist eating at least one of these.

When he made it to the labs, Jane and Darcy were huddled around a piece of their arts and crafts, pasted together equipment. Jane was crouched on the floor, twisting her head to look underneath the belly of the metal beast, but Darcy was bent over in half. And behind her a couple of the lousy interns - who had slurped down those pastel colored frappes he’d bought and then  _ complained _ about the flavor - were miming having sex with her from behind. With gestures.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Johnny barked, making the interns jump and scatter.

“They’re imagining that I would let them fuck me,” Darcy said, pressing a bit of duct tape over a loose joint in the machinery. She straightened and turned, leveling the interns with a glare over the edge of her glasses that Johnny was plenty familiar with. She added, “Which I would not.”

“She’s your boss and your fucking superior in all other ways,” Johnny snapped at the interns who were  _ now _ pretending to be invisible or productive or some other equally unlikely thing behind their Stark tablets. “If she doesn’t report you to HR this time, you better believe I will next time.”

When he turned back to Darcy she was standing with her arms folded across her chest and her head tilted to one side as she looked him over with a small smile on her face.

“Fifteen percent,” she said, and before he could stutter out a ‘huh?’ she asked, “What’s in the box?”

“Cupcakes,” he said. And then he lifted the lid.

She perked up onto her tiptoes to get a better look at the contents. “Fine. Eighteen percent. But I get the one that looks like tiramisu.”

“Well I was gonna fight you for it, but okay,” Johnny said.

She smirked and went back to work and he went to look for a good spot where he could stare down the little nerds who’d just made it to his shit list. And also maybe where he could watch Darcy working.

  
  


  
  
Halfway Point

  
“So how are things going with Darcy?” Sue asked.

Johnny was resisting the urge to stand on his tiptoes, or a chair, or the bar, and scan the crowd for the woman in question.

“Forty-nine percent,” he said, trying to stretch himself upwards. Damn, he had promised himself he would never feel jealous of Reed and now… now he really wished he could make his neck just another inch longer.

“I think you should really come up with a measuring system for your relationship that isn’t numerical,” Sue said.

“It’s not a relationship yet,” Johnny said. “That’s the problem.”

He missed the way Sue spit a little bit of her cocktail back into the glass and had to wipe the dribble off her chin.

“Never thought I’d hear you say that,” she said after recovering.

There was a buzz in his back pocket, and then a little chime of ‘Burning Down the House’ and Johnny nearly dropped the top-heavy martini glass in his hand trying to get to his phone.

“Wow,” Sue breathed next to him. “What a development.”

But Darcy’s name was on the screen of his phone and he was busy swiping to find her message.

Be a hero and come rescue this damsel. Table 5 by the balcony. I’ll bump you up to 55%

Johnny managed somehow to leave his drink in Sue’s hand as he pushed through the crush of people around the bar. He was somewhere between thrilled to have gotten the text, and fury at the mention of a ‘rescue.’ He was starting to shed heat and a few women that had been turning in his direction, stumbled back as he passed them. There was breathing room beyond the crowd and his view was clear, a straight line between the dinner tables and schmoozing clusters of donors and celebrities and heroes.

And there she was, slowly rolling her eyes as she scanned the room for an escape route from the pair of stuffed shirts that had her cornered by a banquet table. She was clutching a glass of red wine in her hand like it was a beer bottle, taking small but frequent sips. Her other arm was folded over her stomach, hand holding her elbow in tight like she was trying to shrink. She was in a little black t-shirt dress and scuffed shoes but later when Johnny would explain to Sue how exactly she stood out from the crowd, it wouldn’t be about how underdressed she was, or how she looked like she’d managed to drag Jane out of the lab with five minutes to get ready.

Because he couldn’t really focus on anything but how nice her hair looked under the sparkling chandelier lights. And also, how miserable she looked as one of the stuffed shirts reached out and wrapped a hand around her shoulder, squeezing twice, hard enough for Johnny to see the indent he made in her soft skin. He crossed the stretch of space between them and reached her just as the older man - one of Reed’s breed, academic and in love with the sound of his own voice - was pulling away.

“With your connection to Doctor Foster’s work you must take great interest in magnetohydrodynamics,” the grabby hands man was saying. “It’s a specialty of mine and I’d be happy to explain some of the more complicated aspects.”

“Aren’t you and the good Doc working on observational astrophysics, rather than theoretical?” The men looked non-plussed by Johnny’s interruption but when Darcy’s eyes relaxed behind her glasses, he really didn’t care.

“We cover the gamut,” Darcy said. And to Johnny’s surprise, she stepped closer to him. He forced himself to cool off, to calm down, but she was making it hard with the way she was almost leaning into his side. “Although I prefer resistive MHDs to ideal.”

When the second stuffed shirt’s eyes lit up and his mouth opened to chime in, Johnny cut in with, “Hey, did I mention there’s an emergency in the lab?”

“An emergency in the lab, you say?” Darcy said with comically large eyes and one hand wilting dramatically to her chest.

She was laying it on thick and it took every ounce of Johnny’s self-control to try not to grin. Which meant that he utterly failed.

“Yeah it’s pretty serious, and Foster says you’re the only one familiar enough with the quasar readings to solve the problem.”

“Oh well if it’s the quasar, then yeah,” Darcy said with a solemn nod. “I hope no one’s started another galactic event over mislabeling the redshifts. Excuse me gentleman,” she said, as Johnny started to lead her gently away with a hand on her waist. She added, as she turned away from them, “I am a very important person.”

She was snorting and giggling while he rushed them both through the sea of tuxedos and cocktail gowns that was now spreading out from the bar.

“Please, please tell me you can make up a good reason to let me stay in the lab for the rest of the night?” Darcy said, and yeah, she was definitely leaning against him now.

“I will personally threaten to melt all of the equipment if you don’t entertain me in the labs all evening,” Johnny said.

“Awesome,” she sighed. She perked up as they got closer to the exit. “Okay. But you can have sixty-two percent if you go grab one of those canapé trays and meet me upstairs.”

“I will see you in ten minutes with a full range of tiny edibles,” Johnny said.

Up thirteen percent in one night was excellent progress. The smile on her face at his promise was even better.

  
  
  
  


62% to the Finish Line

“Wait. What?” Johnny froze in the hall and Darcy curved around him without looking up from her pile of notes.

“62%,” she repeated.

“Why?” Was he whining? He wasn’t, was he? He was. “Yesterday I was at 68%. What gives? You haven’t dropped me down like this since Everhart wrote that bogus article with the photo that was two years old.”

“Storm, I can’t right now,” Darcy said, with a glance over her shoulder. There were dark circles of her eyes and smudges on her glasses and a constellation of singed threads on the shoulder of her cardigan. Who’d let Darcy Lewis get burnt? Whose fuck up had that been?

“Darce, wait. Hey, wait-”

“Johnny,” Darcy snapped, turning in place and glaring at him over the rim of her glasses. “You have seen me in the same outfit for three days now. I smell funny. Don’t argue with me, Storm. I smell like battery acid. This is a fact. I am running on four hours sleep for three days and I know exactly, from experience, what that does to my complexion. I am irritable, I am irrational, and I am fucking unfriendly right now. So, yeah, I am taking you 62% seriously about wanting to date me. I don’t even want to date me right now. Okay? Now I need to go to work so I can finish these readings with Jane and force her to take a break.”

Her cheeks had dark splotches of color and yeah, she was a little sallow. And her eyes were watering behind those glasses and she just…she was just gorgeous. At 68% and rising he’d practically been able to taste the end game of their on-going flirtation. If Darcy Lewis took his offer of a date 100% seriously he got to take her out. And now that finish line was retreating? Not fair.

“Your logic is flawed, Lewis,” he shouted as she tried to retreat behind the glass doors of Foster’s lab. “You’re still pretty and you know it! Hey! Lewis! Do you want a coffee and a bagel?!”

She was gone. Damn. He could try again tomorrow and hopefully by then she’d have gotten some rest. If she hadn’t, he might set off the fire alarms in the lab so Foster would give her a fucking break.

Johnny’s shoulders drooped and he turned to head back to the elevators.

“Toasted everything. Lox. Scallion cream cheese. The most disgustingly sweet latte the barista can stand to make.”

Johnny spun and Darcy’s head was peeking out the doorway, her eyes focused on the shiny floors, hair swinging over her pink cheeks.

“Got it,” he said. “No problem.”

“72%,” she said, and then vanished back into the lab.

Johnny grinned and his skin itched hot. That finish line was looking sweeter than ever.

  
  
  


80% and the End is Near

Reed was threatening to kick Johnny off the team.

“You’re barely ever around,” he droned on. “You show up for emergencies but that’s about it.”

“Thought you’d be happy to have me out of your hair, Richards,” Johnny said with a shrug on his way out of the office. “Besides, you’d have to change the name to…Tremendous Trio or something. Sounds dumb.”

“You’re not the only one who can set themselves on fire,” Reed called as the door swung shut.

And while Johnny seriously doubted Reed could talk Pepper Potts or Pyro onto the team without getting himself set on fire (did that count?) he didn’t mind the prospect of being on the Avengers for a change. Or just a lab flunky. If he was just a lab flunky he could slouch around in this frayed old armchair and watch Darcy Lewis scream out ‘Gimme All Your Love’ at the top of her lungs whenever he wanted. Which, despite the tuneless quality of her voice, might be all the time.

Jane was out in the field with some of the interns taking readings this week and Darcy was in charge of making sure nothing fell apart or exploded in the labs. Which meant that no one was around to ask Johnny if he couldn’t find something better to do. Because Darcy hadn’t asked him that in weeks.

The music ended with striking chords and Darcy tossed her hair back and forth before appearing at the side of the arm chair.

“Tell Sue I said ‘thanks’ for letting you keep me company this week,” she said.

Her cheeks were pink and her hair was fluffy around her head from all the whipping around and he just wanted to tackle her to the floor, gently of course, and kiss her until she couldn’t think or speak or breathe. As retaliation. For the way he seemed to be having a hard time doing those things around her recently.

“Sue says ‘thanks’ for keeping me out of her hair this week,” he said.

Darcy grinned and propped herself up on the arm of the chair. She smelled like coffee and spices and he was itching to touch her, to pull her down against him. But he was at eighty percent and a little bit terrified of risking his place for any reason.

“So, hypothetically speaking,” she said, the pink in her cheeks growing as she looked away from him and up to the ceiling, “What kind of date would you take me on? After you’ve reached one hundred.”

“Well it was gonna be a Fleetwood Mac concert,” he said, grinning as she twitched next to him. “But apparently my timing was off.” She’d already apologized for that one but he liked to tease her.

“If you find us a time machine to the original Rumors tour, I will go to a Fleetwood Mac concert,” Darcy said with a wave of her hand. “But in the meantime…I dunno. What would it be? Like…some trendy cocktail bar? A night club?” Her nose wrinkled at the thought and he stifled a smile.

“Oh yeah,” he said, nodding. “Yeah, I’d take you out on the bike. Get your hair nice and full of bugs. Then we’d roll up to some place with no discernible signage and a beefy bouncer and get our pictures taken by all the paparazzi I called earlier.”

“We’ve come a long way,” Darcy mused, pulling off her glasses to rub at the bridge of her nose. “Cause now I can tell you’re joking.”

“I have a restaurant picked out,” he said.

She blinked at him. “You do?”

He nodded. “They kinda owe me a favor for stopping a kitchen fire there one time.”

It had been more than a kitchen fire really, but either way. And he’d only been to the little creperie in St. Marks in the first place because he’d overheard Darcy telling Jane that their food had been better than sex. (It was close but not quite and he hoped one day he got to prove that to her.)

“A private dinner?” she asked and he nodded. “Sounds kind of fancy.”

“It’s a little place. Not too fancy,” he said. Not too fancy if you didn’t count the fact that he’d already planned a special menu out with the owner and had them set back a couple bottles of the genuine french wines they got in. “And then, I’d ask if you wanted to take a walk with me.”

“A walk?”

“Yeah. I have it mapped out. It’s a long walk.”

“Huh.”

“Walk not good enough for you, Lewis?” he asked, trying to laugh but instead just wincing.

“A walk sounds good,” she said and he thought she looked a little startled. “You have it mapped out? That’s… kind of cocky.” She didn’t sound convinced of that, though.

“Optimistic,” he said.

She stared down at him for a long minute until he wanted to slink out of the armchair to find a hiding spot. She set her glasses down on the table behind her and swept her hair over one shoulder. And then she was leaning forward, her hands on his neck just below his ears, and her lips settling softly against his. It was a reflex to kiss her back, to pull her down from the armchair to slide into his lap, to bite softly at her bottom lip and swipe it with a flick of his tongue. And it was a relief to taste the salt and spice on her lips, to twist his arms around her waist and hunt under the hem of her sweater for closer contact, to hear the little squeak of surprise as he sank back against the cushions and pulled her flush to his chest. She hummed into his mouth as his fingertips found the skin at her waist. One of her hands slid down to his chest to fist into his t-shirt and the other combed lightning trails up the back of his neck into his hair.

He pulled back for a breath and caught her smiling. Her lips were wet and red, and she bit lightly into the soft swell of the bottom one, making him feel a little dizzy at the picture.

“You tryin’ to take advantage of me, Lewis?” he asked, only half aware of the direction of his words.

She raised one eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“We’re aren’t even at one hundred yet,” he said. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. What was he doing?

“One hundred?” she asked, her brow furrowing and that bitten red bottom lip pouting out. “But…that’s for a date.”

“Can’t ask me to go around kissing girls who aren’t one hundred percent sure about me,” he said. Why was his chest aching like this? Why wasn’t he keeping his mouth busy with kissing Darcy?

“I … well. Yeah, okay,” she said.

And then she was scrabbling over the arm of the chair again, retreating from him. Damn. Damnit, Johnny.

He started to reach for her, to make up for his runaway mouth but then she added, “I guess you better finish up that last ten percent soon then.”

“Ten?” he asked, hand outstretched toward her retreating back.

“Yeah. Ninety percent down…ten to go.” She flashed him a smile over her shoulder and then slid her glasses back on her nose before bending to squint into a monitor.

Ten to go.

  
  
  


99% So Lets Call it Over

He’d been sitting at ninety-nine percent for the last two weeks. He’d stopped asking for updates after the first few days but Darcy’d only gotten more skittish every time he walked into the lab. And he knew that maybe he needed give her some room because  _ something _ was up. But he was a little afraid that if he did, she would stretch the distance even farther between them.

And yet…stalled out at ninety-nine for the fifteenth day in a row? He felt farther away from gaining Darcy’s trust than he had in the single digit days at the start of everything.

So he spent two days moping around the Fantastic headquarters and hunting doombots on the east side, hoping to hear from her. Which, technically, he did. She sent him a little two second video bite of Tony getting charged at by one of his electronic minions and a cat-cry-laughing emoji.

So now he was in the resident quarters of Avengers Tower (turns out Steve Rogers wasn’t so bad really, cause he’d helped him get in without much convincing) pacing the hall outside of Darcy’s apartment door.

He hadn’t knocked yet. He wasn’t sure he was going to knock. He wasn’t sure he was going to leave and head back home either, though. He might just pace the hall until she appeared and hope that…that she would want to talk to him.

No. No, he was going to knock.

His first ‘rap’ on the door was harder then he meant to be, the next two too soft. He made some kind of intricate pattern of knocks just in his attempt at finding the one that sounded normal. Non urgent. Chill.

But no one answered.

He tried two more. More half-hearted. And then he paced.

And then he thought it was time to give up and go. He should have texted. Or just waited for her to text him.

He turned in place and saw Darcy at the end of the hall, a bag slipping off her shoulder to the crook of her arm as she stared at him.

“Hey,” he said and a moment later he lifted a hand in a small wave.

“Hey,” she said, voice small from the other end of the hall.

“Um. Can we talk?” he asked.

She shifted her bag and pushed her glasses up her nose and looked around the hall, as if he might have been speaking to someone else.

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

They met at her door and Johnny felt like running in circles, trying to burn off some of the nerves rattling under his skin and the heat sparking through his blood. She walked in ahead of him and dropped her bag on the kitchen island counter, fiddling with the straps and keeping her back to him.

“I think we should stop with the percentages, Darce,” he said as the door clicked shut behind him.

She whirled around, eyes wide. “What? Why?”

He hadn’t even really known how tied up in knots he was until she looked at him with that startled disappointment and one of the knots loosened in his gut.

“Cause it’s making you nervous and avoid me and I just… don’t want to stop being…the way we were.”

“Oh. Which part?” she asked, and she let go of her bag and took a step closer to him.

“All of it,” he said.

“The kiss?”

“Yeah that too. And the you yelling at me in the hall part. And giving me shit over every little present. And not putting up with my crap. And…like…teaching me about how to really …care about someone.”

She blinked. “I did that?”

“It’s a pretty specific case for who I’m caring about at this point, but yeah,” he said and he didn’t bother fighting his smile.

“I’m really nervous, Johnny,” she said. “I do…I am…” she huffed and tried again, “I just…don’t want to be wrong.”

“About me?”

She nodded and bit her lip.

“You’re not wrong about me,” he said with a shrug. “You never have been.”

He tried not to fidget under her gaze. She seemed to be studying him, considering him, and he wanted to let her. He really needed her to be sure.

“Can you come over here?” she asked.

He started walking but she was on her way to him too and they met at the edge of the hall. He wanted to touch her and he was ninety-nine percent sure Darcy wouldn’t mind. But he got it, he really did. That one percent was kind of scary right now.

“So…if we aren’t doing the percentages, does that mean our dinner and walk are out?” she asked.

“Nope. Nope, definitely not. Our dinner and walk are available whenever you want them,” he said, eyebrows raising.

“Tomorrow night,” she said

“Tomorrow night? Yeah! Yeah, you got it. Tomorrow night,” he said and his head was bobbing up and down and would not stop.

She smiled up at him and then took her glasses off and hung them from the collar of her t-shirt.

“So we’re just…doing our thing now?” she asked.

“Yeah. Yeah. Let’s do this thing.” He realized that his face actually hurt. He’d been smiling for awhile now and he was only just realizing how  _ hard  _ he was smiling.

This time, when Darcy reached for him, lifted her face up with a glance at his mouth, he was ready. This time  _ he _ kissed  _ her _ , trying to catch every texture of her mouth, every happy sound from her throat. When she jumped up, he lifted her and buried the flare in temperature at the feel of her winding around him. When they broke apart for air he found the spot on her throat where she would press her thumb when she was nervous or angry, and he sucked a mark there until she was shuddering in his hold.

“You’re staying,” she said, ordered. “You’re staying the night, Storm.”

He pulled off her neck with a soft ‘pop’. “You sure?”

She giggled and looked down at him with a brilliant grin. “One hundred percent.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> leave me some sugar!


End file.
